SKFox

FF3 about:config dire warning

Shaun Kester — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:52:32 +0000

Firefox 3 provides this dire warning when you type about:config in the address bar.

Firefox 3.0.1 Encoding Change (Bug?)

Shaun Kester — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:23:26 +0000

So, FF 3.0.1 was seriously pissing me off today. I’ll spare details as not very many people are VFP developers but it came down to something fairly simple.

When a request comes into my web app, I check the CONTENT_TYPE header. Most browsers send this…

application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Firefox 3.0.1 is sending…

application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8

…which completely threw my program off when using FF3, while IE6/7, Opera, and Safari were working just fine. The program is using jQuery, the form plugin, etc so the problem could have been anywhere.

I finally broke down and asked for help. Rick was nice enough to point out the flaws in my logic and get me back on track.

2.5 hours of pulling my hair out. Grrr!

Comcast speedy when it wants to be

Shaun Kester — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:08:27 +0000

I stopped by speedtest.net recently to see how my connection is doing.

Speedtest.net results

I know that speedboost is supposed to speed up small files, but this much? It absolutely sucks when I’m trying to move a few hundred megs up/down from my servers, but regardless this was pretty damn fast.

What drives me nuts is that they will boost my speed up to 20Mb/second for some small files when I would just settle for 1Mb/second consistantly. If I try to FTP/SFTP a few hundred files to my server, my speeds will drop to dial-up or worse.

Trying to compete on theoretical limits is like trying to compete with free. Don’t do it. Sell me a consistent, reliable, unthrottled connection and I may go with you because I want to instead of the lack of options. Do that, and I’ll be impressed.

PC Club closing…again?

Shaun Kester — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:49:49 +0000

Something is up with PC Club…again. We’ve been here before and I think the niche that they fill will be void in their absence, especially here in Salem, Oregon where a majority of the computer shops are either box stores or junk resellers. I’ve seen a couple of new computer stores open, but they don’t seem to have websites or any marketing going on. Here are some strange screenshots from pcclub.com that only seem to reinforce the events.

Only two systems available

No Stores #1

No Stores #2

Houston area car chase: Suprise ending

Shaun Kester — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:04:33 +0000

I saw this today while home for lunch. Sarah and I were watching it live and were absolutely shocked at the ending. See for yourself.

After being handcuffed, he got up on his own and appears to be uninjured.

[MyFox Houston]

Anatomy of an outage

Shaun Kester — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:13:16 +0000

By all accounts, yesterdays GMail outage was pretty big. It just so happens that I ranked in the first few results in the SERPs for keywords related to the outage. The traffic influx was huge.

Media Temple (the SKFox.com host) uses a system called GPUs or Grid Processing Units to give you a good idea of how much CPU, I/O, and disk space you are using on their system. Yesterdays spike is fairly obvious.

Mint, from haveamint.com, gave me my first clue as to what was going on. While I like the depth of Google Analytics, the real time stats from my Mint installation are priceless.

SKFox.com normally gets about 100 visitors per day. At the peak of the outage, I was getting about 23 per minute. That’s awesome, but hopefully there isn’t another repeat anytime soon.

Olympic Costs?

Shaun Kester — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:17:17 +0000

My wife wondered what hosting the modern Olympics cost a nation. My GoogleFu has initially failed me, but I think I’ve found some rough estimates. If anybody can fill in the details or find better estimates, please leave me a comment.

2008 Beijing: $42 billion
2006 Turino: ?
2004 Athens: $15 billion
2002 Salt Lake City: $1.3 billion
2000 Sydney: $3.4 billion
1998 Nagano: ?
1996 Atlanta: $1.8 billion
1994 Lillehammer: ?
1992 Barcelona: ?
1992 Albertville: ?

Brinley reading a book

Shaun Kester — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:04:47 +0000

Brinley takes the GMail outage in stride by deciding to read a good book.

Another major gMail 502 outage

Shaun Kester — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:52:45 +0000

Earlier this week I saw about 300 visits over a 24 hour period from people searching for solutions to the error message they were getting when logging into Gmail. I have seen over 800 in the last hour. Sure enough, my gmail is out too with a Temporary Error (502). POP3 seems to be working. Following my survival guide, I checked the Gmail google group. The issue for today, 11 August 2008, is a known issue with the web interface, they acknowledge that POP3 and IMAP are still working.

Here is to all of you and myself, let us hope it comes back up soon.

Update 1: Mine is back up after about an hour. Anybody else?

Update 2: 2,000+ hits in an hour because of this. Media Temple server holding up nicely.

Previous outages

Help

Other coverage

Google getting smarter

Shaun Kester — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:10:59 +0000

I did a quick search today on ‘medal count‘ to try and find out where the US stands on medals for the Olympic games. I expected to find the official Olympics site or some other coverage of the games in the search results, only to have to drill down from there. Imagine my surprise when Google gave me the answer right in the search results. Very cool.